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Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

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Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#291

Post by sgerenser »

dboreham wrote: post #189
jiggawatts wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a "Citrix consultant" for about two decades. I'd walk into customer sites for the first time, meet people, and within minutes they would start ranting about how bad Citrix is. I suspect only dentists get this kind of feedback from customers before a procedure. Having said that, 99% of the time the problem boils down to this: The guy (and it is a guy) signing the cheques either doesn't use Citrix OR uses it from…

I've never used Citrix but I remember when I had a T-1 (1.54Mbits for the younglings) and I left a Remote Desktop session open on a laptop. Some days later I went back to the laptop and used it for an hour before I realized I was in a RDP session to a machine in another state. I wonder what Citrix screwed up to make their UX so different. Of course a decent T-1 back then probably had better latency than today's consu…

Yeah the T1 easily had enough bandwidth to smoothly send the 800x600 16 bit color desktop you were probably running at the time (guessing the timeframe based on usage of a T1). Frame to frame diff was probably much easier as well with less shadows and graphical effects that modern Windows or Linux DEs have.

I don’t doubt Citrix has gotten worse as well but the job it had to do back then was much easier.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#292

Post by dragonwriter »

zasdffaa wrote: post #261
acdha wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in general but I do blame Citrix for some foot-guns. The Citrix admins at my employer have never figured out how to configure it to get keyboard latency below ~120ms (on a gigabit LAN), and the silly health meter always reports the connection as excellent. This is mostly on them - in classic enterprise IT thinking, if it’s not down your job is done - but I’m somewhat disappointed that it’s even possible to co…

A 120ms should feel immediate. IIRC anything under 300ms feels instant.

That contradicts fairly long-held understanding:

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-...

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#293

Post by systemvoltage »

arcbyte wrote: post #286
systemvoltage wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Accessible from anywhere (I use my pc, my laptop, etc. The env is always the same) This is a feature in search of a problem for me. I never wake up in the morning and go “Gee only if I can code on random computers”. It sounds super nice but then I think about it a little more and it’s just fluff.

I have a website with a worker process doing RSS parsing that occasionally fails. It would be quite nice to be able to spend 10 minutes fixing trivial bugs from my phone while I'm out and about. Or from my iPad. I'm not doing feature development but this would be nice to have for things that are so easy I could do them now but instead must wait hours or days until I'm back in front of my dev machine. And actually I h…

I mean there are always going to be niche uses for this.

My point is about corporations adopting this sort of a thing because executives got sold on a fancy feature "Accessible from anywhere" but no one really materializes it for 99.99% of the time they are not coding from anywhere but have to suffer latency the entire time.

It sounds so damn good on paper vs. reality.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#294

Post by ctoth »

aleksiy123 wrote: post #290
aleksiy123 wrote: post #259

I would have agreed until I started working at Google. Also, you should completely avoid having Remote Desktop and instead use ssh + an editor that works with remote files. At Google we have a custom fork of VSCode running in browser and builds can either be distributed or run on my Linux VM to utilize build cache. I liked it so much I started doing a similar setup for small side projects. Just boot up the Cloud Cons…

There is one more point I would like to add to the "less friction to start." This is the killer feature for education. No more do students have to set up their own envs. Figure out PYTHONPATH. No more do educators need to debug installation issues on 3 different OSes. Teachers distribute a pre setup env which they know works for what they are trying to teach. Students go straight into writing code and building things…

Learning to set up my environment to compile my first MUD back in 1999 was my first introduction to Autotools, ./configure, make, etc. I was motivated to solve the problem because I wanted to tinker. I'm sure someone will say I'm gatekeeping, but seriously these low-level skills have served me my entire career, and I wonder what happens when every dev environment is just a docker pull away. Who learns how to build new environments?

That said, I have recently been tinkering with the Flipperzero firmware, and compared to the old Rockbox days when you had to install an arm-elf-gcc toolchain yourself and pray, embedded development has gotten way easier and this doesn't seem like a bad thing. I don't have an answer, just something to think about!

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#295

Post by jdelman »

aleksiy123 wrote: post #259

I would have agreed until I started working at Google. Also, you should completely avoid having Remote Desktop and instead use ssh + an editor that works with remote files. At Google we have a custom fork of VSCode running in browser and builds can either be distributed or run on my Linux VM to utilize build cache. I liked it so much I started doing a similar setup for small side projects. Just boot up the Cloud Cons…

Out of curiosity, how much are you paying a month using Cloud Console that way?

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#296

Post by ryukafalz »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #235
ryukafalz wrote: post #108

This is where I wish Plan 9 had caught on. It lets you run remote graphical apps more seamlessly than any remote desktop I know of today.

better than X11 did? better than Display Postscript did? (genuinely wondering since i've not had a chance to play with Plan 9, kinda randomly)

X forwarding involves granting the remote system access to your X socket, which is very powerful. I don’t know for sure that Plan 9’s model avoids this (I’ve only had small chances here and there to play with Plan 9), but given its heavy use of namespacing I suspect it’s at least possible.

Performance-wise X forwarding was always pretty slow for me in a way that Plan 9 seems to avoid, though I’ve gathered it used to be more efficient prior to modern graphical toolkits that want to draw a bunch of bitmaps to the screen. It’s possible they were more evenly matched in the past.

Not sure about Display Postscript, never had a chance to try that one.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#297

Post by theandrewbailey »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #64
GianFabien wrote: post #30

The cost of a new fullly-spec'd workstation + high performance laptop is tiny compared to the salary of good software developers. Managements have a warped sense of how to save money and as a result grossly hurt morale and productivity where it matters the most.

Some companies in UK still provide 1080p monitors of the lowest quality

At least they provide monitors. I imagine that many don't.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#298

Post by danans »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #269
danans wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote desktops can work great if you constrain and structure what you do in them. For me, this means not using traditional desktop environments like gnome/kde/windows/macos, but instead a full screen tiled window manager (i3 in my case) with different virtual desktops assigned to different work items. Each virtual desktop is split in half between the IDE (vim in my case) and a terminal session for the code under dev…

> Each virtual desktop is split in half between the IDE (vim in my case) and a terminal session for the code under development in that IDE. That's it. No silly weather or chat widgets (all that lives in my local laptop's traditional desktop). I don't disagree, but if your editor is vim and you run/test in a terminal, why not do the whole thing in tmux in SSH?

> you run/test in a terminal

Some of the software has a GUI, and some of the tools (i.e. unit test runners) display their output in a locally (to the remote desktop) running web app viewed via a browser.

If I were doing strictly text-based work, I might use tmux, but to be honest i3 scales down so well to the text-only use case that I probably wouldn't bother, since there is no upside to doing so.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#299

Post by MarkSweep »

sz4kerto wrote: post #274
MarkSweep wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can confirm that using JetBrains Gateway to run IntelliJ is more pleasant than using Chrome Remote Desktop, X11 forwarding, JetBrains projector, or Xpra.

Except it's still buggy like hell.

I should have said, being better than those alternatives is a very low bar.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#300

Post by icedchai »

acdha wrote: post #258
icedchai wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long ago was this? 4 megabits would be pretty good... back in 1998!

This _very_ much depended on where you are. I had symmetric 10Mbps at home in 1998 but when we moved to New Haven in 2008 Verizon couldn't deliver more than ISDN / T1 to large chunks the city (we literally could have used a WiFi antenna to hit their regional headquarters, too). There's so much deferred maintenance around the world.

True, true! I had a 3 megabit cable modem at home, back in 1998 (3 megabits down, 128kbits up, if I recall.)

My office at the time had dual T1's... a little over 3 megabits shared with roughly 500 people.

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